FSF Compliance Lab Addresses GPLv3 Questions

GeekyBodhi writes "Brett Smith, the licensing compliance engineer at FSF's Free Software Licensing and Compliance Lab held a public question and answer session in an IRC meeting last night. At the meeting Smith addressed questions regarding various sections of GPLv3 (Linux.com shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) including Section 7 (additional rights), and Section 11 (patents and patent protection), and explained how the incompatibility between GPLv2 and GPLv3 doesn't rule out any interaction between differently licensed programs."

Re:Is the complexity worth it? - Agreed

[Xtifr]

One of the things that really made GPLv2 approachable was it's directness and simplicity.

Wow, you've got a funny notion of "directness and simplicity".

~ $ wc /usr/share/common-licenses/BSD
  26 225 1499 /usr/share/common-licenses/BSD
~ $ wc /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL
  339 2968 17987 /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2

I've been listening to people complain about the length and complexity of the GPL for years! Frankly, I think once you've gone beyond the point where the average person can easily grasp it (which the GPLv2 was clearly beyond, IMO), there's little point in not going the rest of the way to do things right (which the GPLv3 mostly does, IMO). I particularly like the increased compatibility with other licenses. V3 may be longer, but it still seems pretty straightforward to me.

Bottom line: so many people misunderstand or misinterpret v2 on a regular basis that it's really hard for me to believe that v3 is going to make things noticeably worse. People are still going to be posting about how the GPL means you can't charge money and you're going to be forced to release all of your company's code. Dummies will remain dummies. And I think I grok both versions pretty well, so I really don't see a problem.

Of course, it may just be that I'm old enough to remember the huge controversies and flamewars about v2 when that was new. Kids today seem to accept it as standard and noncontroversial, but it was as despised and reviled in its day as v3 is now.